Plans & Schemes

by jkatejohnston

December 7

Dear Max,

I read the first draft of the second book in my mystery-law series—the one I finished in October and set aside. (See Naming Names.)

It’s not a disaster. Its main problem is too much incident, not enough story. By incident I mean events thought up by the author that the people in the book react to. By story I mean what has to happen because of who the people are.

Like in the Last Chronicle, there’s hardly any incident at all. The event that sets the story in motion is as simple as can be, and hardly believable. (I think Trollope said that himself in his autobiography.) But the story is tremendous. Mr. Crawley, Mrs. Proudie, the Archdeacon—these enormous, complicated forces stirring up the world—it’s like something out of the Iliad. And you get to laugh too, never as decoration or comic relief, but always with recognition and sympathy.

But back to my book. I’m not going to get depressed because it’s not as good as Trollope’s masterpiece. I just have to start over from the beginning and try to do more with the parts that have some life in them. Get rid of the rest. Hope the plot still works at the end of all that. And put in the world. I always forget to do that.

December 8

Dear Max,

Teresa set up our higher-speed internet yesterday, and now my laptop won’t go online until I figure out how to make it speak to the new router, or possibly modem (if those still exist), and it’s probably just a matter of putting in a new password, but it always seems to be harder than that, and I don’t really want to hassle with it, and it just occurred to me:

Don’t.

I’ve been fantasizing about a computer that doesn’t go online—in short a very fancy typewriter—and wondering how to disable the parts of my laptop that connect it to the internet. And here I am.

If I had internet right now, I would be picking out a cheese grater for Enzo and Teresa to get me for Christmas. And there would be so many cheese graters. And other cheese-related items. And graters that do other things, not to mention the cheeses themselves, all different kinds, which would somehow lead to cashmere sweaters, slippers for Enzo, lip gloss for Davia-Astrid, and that’s just the shopping. I might also check my email to make sure I don’t miss the rejections from Fahrenheit or Algonquin, and there would probably be something from The New Yorker, and I might click on that and read a whole article, and click on the links in the article, or the ads beside the article, which would probably be cheese-related, because Google Knows, and that might take me back to—No!

I reject the false wonderland of infinite choice.

I say fie to the vortex of trivial distraction.

And yet I long to be shopping. I feel so powerful when I click Place This Order—and then it arrives. And when you think about it, it’s a huge time-saver, which means I have more time to write. Right?

Get away from me, you devil!

December 10

Dear Max,

It’s 4:18. I guess I should add—a.m. I’m at the kitchen table with coffee. Even though I’m not re-writing my book yet, I’m trying to acclimate body, mind and spirit to the Trollopian schedule that’s my only hope for rewriting it next year. (He had servants, but I have modern conveniences.)

Things to acquire:

Coffee maker with timer and a thermos carafe.

Alexa plug that automatically turns on lamp and heater at my desk at four o’clock. Maybe not the heater. I don’t want Alexa starting any fires.

A computer that works only as a typewriter. (See above.)

A small printer.

Bigger thoughts

I had a couple of story ideas for the re-write, and I may as well include them here:

You know how, when you write text messages, the phone suggests the words to complete your sentence, based on its knowledge of what you’ve texted before? And it’s mortifying how often the phone is right—that is exactly what you were going to say next. (It’s bad enough to be so predictable, but by a phone? Maybe I should just have my phone rewrite my book.) Anyway, my idea is that a person who is trying to cover her tracks might well erase her text messages. But if you had her phone, you could type in a word or two, and the phone would auto-complete the sentence in a way that revealed—something important!

The other idea has dropped out of my mind. Dang it. Oh, it was to include a scene of running into the judge in the shower at the Y. That’s all. This is probably a perfect example of what I’m calling incident, but maybe if I make it good enough, it will turn into story.